When Life Gives you Ash, Make Art

A villager cleans ash from the roof of a damaged house in East Java on Feb. 17, days after Mount Kelud erupted, forcing at least 100,000 people to evacuate. See more photos.

JAKARTA, Indonesia–When Indonesia’s Mount Kelud erupted last week, it spit out enough ash to blanket towns hundreds of kilometers away. In just three hours, the volcano dumped 105 million cubic meters of volcanic matter across the island of Java, enough to fill more than 1.5 million 40-foot shipping containers.

Now, people in places hit by the debris are forced to clean up, and as they do, pictures of the process are popping up in newspapers and on blogs and social media sites.

Most show residents sweeping the ash from their yards or shoveling it from streets, but Taufik Noor Aditama, saw it as the perfect canvas.

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The 22-year-old freelance photographer from Yogyakarta, around 282 km from Kelud, drew the face of famous physicist Albert Einstein in the ash on his porch and filmed the process – which took around an hour. He uploaded his masterpiece on the photo-sharing site Instagram and posted a video on YouTube.

People can actually be creative or make something unique out of all this ash, said Mr. Aditama, “And I want to show that to my friends, to give them spirit.”

Since his so-called “dust art” was born on Feb. 16 word of his creation has spread widely online and through mobile messenger applications.

“I’m surprised that it’s all over social media now,” said Mr. Aditama. “My initial purpose was only to share it with friends, to inject them with good vibes,” he said.

Now he’s thinking of drawing more faces – especially with so much ash still left around his home.

Since Mount Kelud erupted on Feb. 13, killing at least four people, forcing more than 100,000 to evacuate, and cancelling hundreds of flights, officials in Yogyakarta, have been urging people to clean up their neighborhoods and put the ash in sacks.

Authorities at the local disaster mitigation agency are warning residents not to wash the ash from their homes to keep it from blocking drains. Surono, the head of the government’s Geology Agency, said people could actually use the ash as a construction material to create a concrete mix. Farmers also say it makes for more fertile soil.

Courtesy of Taufik Noor Aditama

Mr. Aditama thinks of drawing more faces, since so much ash still left around his home.

But Mr. Aditama said most of what he’s heard about the ash has been complaints.

“I saw a lot of photos on social media … about the ash,” he said. People were grumbling that it was difficult to clean, or described it as “a huge disaster.”

Mr. Aditama said he created the video to put a positive on what happened, and he included a quote from Einstein on the video to make people think.

“There are only two ways to live your life,” it says. “One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Life a choice, between happy and sad, said Mr. Aditama. “If you can, just enjoy [things that happen], don’t sweat about it.”

Activity at Mount Kelud has calmed since it expelling ash 17 kilometers into the sky over the weekend, but the volcano remains under the government’s highest alert. It is currently one of Indonesia’s most active volcanoes along with Mount Sinabung on the island of Sumatra.

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